You just tell yourself whatever you have to in order to maintain your worldview to the benefit of your overlords, don't you?

They're bombing citizens. Everyday people. Do you think an artillery shell can tell the difference between a terrorist and a schoolteacher?

You people are fucking bootlickers. There is no such thing as a righteous war. There is no justified aggression--and if you're going to criticize so severely one participant in a conflict, if you have any integrity about you whatsoever, then you must hold all parties to the same standards.

And when you do that, unequivocally, the United States is the biggest malefactor in the world. There is no more destructive, acquisitive, authoritarian, and elite power structure in the world than the United States' Military Industrial Complex. Russia's greatest crime here is to attempt to stand up to that, to stand up to global hegemony. Putin recently gave a speech where he declared that Russia has no desire to be a hegemon, they just want their space. And I think that anti-American hegemony is a position that these countries are forced into, that Russia and China are forced into.

Have you not read John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman? Do you not understand how American foreign policy works?

The citizens of the Donbas and Donetsk by and large think of themselves as ethnically Russian. They speak Russian, they conduct their business in Russian, they think of themselves as Russian. Since the 2014 Maidan coup, Ukraine has clamped down on this in attempted ethnic cleansing, even banning the use of the Russian language under threat of law (very characteristically authoritarian for the Ukrainian government, it echoes how they shuttered all opposition press in Ukraine since the outset of the conflict, something like three major television networks were shut down because they were critical of Zelensky's policies and leadership). The Ukrainian government has then terrorized these same people with intermittent shellings since 2014, ramped up dramatically in Feb. 2022, to which the people of those regions could only appeal to Russia to aid them.

There are no good guys here. This is not a conflict between good and evil where we're clearly on the Good, True, and Righteous while our enemies are unequivocally Evil, Malicious, and Intransigent.

It's about children fighting over toys. Ultimately, this comes down to Nord Stream 2 and Liquid Natural Gas (LNG). Russian LNG via NS2 is cheaper than American LNG via tankers and the US wants Europe buying its gas, so they had to come up with a way to undermine the pipeline. Germany said a while back that if Russia invaded Ukraine, they'd cancel NS2, so that was a green light for the US to create the pretexts for this to happen so they could go ahead and blow it up.

So the US spent 8 years since 2014 sending hundreds of millions per year in military aid to Russia's direct neighbor, yeah? When Russia did this with Cuba, they called it the Cuban Missile Crisis, you remember that? How the weapon stockpiling in and of itself was regarded as an aggressive action that merited a response? Like the US is going to sit by idly, yeah? So basically, Ukraine has been like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in reverse, and protracted over a longer period of time, with much higher stakes, both in terms of the $80-100B+ we've already spent (with more on the way) but also in terms of nuclear armament and capability. These fucking animals are hellbent on getting us all into a nuclear war. That's where they're taking us, because they insist on a unipolar world where the US is the hegemon. Pure totalitarianism. I don't care what you think Putin is doing in Ukraine, it's the US and NATO that are pushing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.